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I carefully and naturally push Saint behind me. I trust Tillie, and I trust her with Saint. I’ve watched how Tillie is with her friends, and she’d die and kill for them. I trust someone like that with her, but it doesn’t mean my natural habits die easy.
“Bran Bran, you’re overthinking it.”
My jaw clenches as Saint sidesteps out from behind me. My muscles seize when I feel her cold hand on my arm. “I’ll be fine. You brought me here, it must be safe.” Before I can tell her that I brought her here to come to Buckingham and not to talk shit with Tillie, she’s already up the stairs and Tillie is blowing me a kiss.
“Fuck,” I breathe out just as I hear Bishop’s Maserati pull up behind me, his door closing loudly.
“The kiss of death is what that is,” he says, gesturing to the front of the house.
I turn to face him as he’s shoving his keys into his pocket. “You showered today?”
“Fuck you.”
No one has asked Bishop what the fuck he’s doing with Madison. I don’t know what is going on inside his head, but Bishop is calculating. He’s a walking, talking bullshitter. Lied his way into Madison’s heart, all to let her walk away with him still caged inside of it. Dumb motherfucker when it comes to her, smartest motherfucker with everything else.
Everyone is too scared to talk about her, but I’m no bitch. “We gonna talk about Madison or what?” I say, flicking my tongue over my bottom lip. Fuck him if he thinks I’m going to pussyfoot around the subject when he let it rain blood just to get her, all to let her fucking walk away. We all fought for their relationship, not just him.
He stills, turning toward me. His eyes are on fire, his fists clenching beside him. He and I have been a little on edge lately, and I know me saying this is going to end in one way, with arms swinging, but the thing about Bishop is that he has to get angry before he makes sense of shit. So I’m fucking counting on him throwing punches.
And I’m not disappointed when his fist is flying into my face. I dodge it and laugh, backing away from him, only I lose my step just as his other fist swings and connects with my jaw. We both go down with Bishop plowing into my face. I take the hits, laughing as blood spills out of my nose and drips down my chin.
“Feel better yet, motherfucker?” I ask around my laughter.
“Fuck! Are you kidding me? Don’t get blood on my driveway, you idiots!” I can hear Tillie yelling, just as Bishop’s weight is being pulled off me and Nate is glaring down, shaking his head.
“Let me guess, you said the M-word.”
Rolling my tongue around the metallic liquid, I spit it all out and swipe my mouth with the back of my hand, unable to hide my smirk. “None of you bitches were going to do it.”
Bishop falls to the ground, his fingers buried in his hair. “This isn’t about me and her.” He glares up at me from beneath his lashes. “This should be about Saint.”
“But it’s not,” I say, getting to my feet and reaching down for his hand to help him up.
He takes it.
I continue, “It will never be about anything else until we’ve spoken about Mads, and you know it. You’re distracted. You can’t see anything past her.”
His eyes fly up to the front of the house where Tillie and Saint are both watching all of us. Saint is focused on me, her focus moving up and down my body frantically.
“So we can talk about Saint after we’ve spoken about Madison.” I push past him and Nate, making my way down the pathway that leads to Buckingham, which is behind the main house. Buckingham is directly behind a line of trees to the side of the house, hidden from plain view. If you didn’t know it was there, you wouldn’t see it. Thick shrubs conceal it perfectly, with the pool the main distraction. Nate and Tillie’s fancy shit. There’s a whole ass bar in the middle of the pool, too.
Pushing through the front door, I kick it closed and drop my cell phone into the metal bowl at the entrance, reaching for a rolled joint that’s on a table and snatching up a Zippo, sparking it up while moving to the negotiation table.
Eli and Hunter are on the sofa, watching the latest news when I’m sinking down onto one of the chairs, inhaling deeply before blowing out a cloud of smoke.
“You mentioned Madship?” Eli chuckles, shaking his head. “Had to be you.”
I ignore him as the door opens and closes again, and Bishop walks through on his phone before hanging up and dumping it into the bowl with the rest.